What I want to know is,.......Who bet I'd change it? Who wins the pool?
Given that I said that I wouldn't unless somebody could see it (and
@jrichker saw it straight away) that left me with the only option available to me.
To cut the old piece of junk off of the hood.
But first, I had to convince myself of that.
It's made from .20 ga steel. Using steel that thin goes against my grain as it is just a giant pain in the ass to work with. Since I had it laying around, I used it. What I got was a piece that ended up w/ an "oil can" effect for what ever reason.
The YouTube solution was to use a torch (an oxyacetylene combo is what I used) to heat a small dot to cherry red, then quickly quench that spot w/ cold water. That process is supposed to shrink the metal, and "tighten" it up so the oil can effect gets pulled out.
I did that.
While it worked, it left the top of that scoop full of dips, and bumps.
This morning, I decided to see if it could be saved, so w/ a hammer and dolly, I tapped and pecked, pounded, and banged on the thing trying to get it to flatten out.
The oil can effect returned.
I got the torch back out and heated up several more spots.
The oil can effect was gone.
Only now, there was a surface that looked like it had been through a meteor shower. Now I could come to terms w/ cutting that oversized, warped assed piece of s hit off the hood.
So I cut it off.
This is what it looks like w/o the scoop on top.
The back story:
Obviously, I needed some steel to recover the new hole I just created in my hood. It was Saturday morning. I knew that I wasn't gonna find what I needed anywhere save for he local Home Depots of the world, so I set out for that very place.
Home depot is a Joke. When it comes to steel the only thing they have is galvanized .24 ga stuff.
I left there and headed for Lowes.
Lowes has steel alright. All of it marked as 16 ga.
I got to looking at it and it seemed "thin" to be 16 ga. so I headed off for the tool area to see if I could find a Vernier Caliper hanging on some hook so that I could measure the thickness to verify that it was in fact 16 ga steel.
See, I didn't
want it to be 16 ga steel,.....I
wanted it to be 18 ga steel. It looked to me like 18 ga, but they were charging a 16 ga. price (35.00 for a 24x 24" sheet). I didn't want to pay 16 ga. prices for 18 ga steel.
Could I find a caliper?.....Nope. The only caliper they had was entombed in plastic, and I wasn't about to open it to see if I was right. So.......What the hell,....I bought it anyway. When I got it home however, that was a different story.
According to my caliper, the stuff I had was .0500 thick. 16 ga. stuff is supposed to be somewhere around .0625.
The stuff I had measured .050.
Did I call Lowes and bi tch out the manager for selling 18 ga. steel at 16 ga. prices?
Damn straight.....Managed to get a 20% credit refunded to my CC as a result.
Regardless, the piece still cost 27.00 dollars.
So now that that was behind me, I set about cutting, and bending the new piece.
* For some strange reason, this stuff cut like 16 ga.,...and it bent like 16 ga.,...but it measured like 18ga.
The pic above show the thing after bending, and then the front 1/8" x 1/2" reinforcement that goes along the leading edge to give me a "stop" to put the grille against.
So now I got this piece tacked in place, and only requiring the little triangle dudes that make up the front transitions;
Still have to build the grille insert, but the left, and right G nostrils match each other.